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"Don't Blame Me." The man who caused this commotion is an Australian citizen with a sharp chin, a penchant for maroon bow ties, and a salesman's exuberance and extroversion. Born in Brisbane, he was the fourth of the eleven children of Paul Schwarz, a Viennese Jew who was converted to Christianity, became a Pentecostal lay preacher, migrated to Australia for his health in 1905 and, after World War I, prospered as a dealer in war-surplus goods. Fred Schwarz graduated from Brisbane's University of Queensland with both science and arts degrees, took a post as a science instructor on the night staff of Queensland Teachers College, and studied medicine during the day. By 1953 he had established a medical practice that was earning him more than $11,000 a year in North Strathfield, a middle-class Sydney suburb; he was a psychiatrist as well as a general practitioner.
But Schwarz had an interest deeper than doctoring. In 1940 he fell into an argument with an Australian Communist. After this debate, he determined to find out all he could about Communism. He steeped himself in the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, to the point that friends recall his wife, Lillian May, saying: "I'm never alone with Fred. He always has Karl Marx along."
Schwarz became a skilled anti-Communist orator, speaking from the pulpit (long a lay preacher, he describes himself as "a narrow-minded, Bible-believing Baptist") or on the public platform. He recalls one triumphant debate in his younger days with a Communist leader in a Sydney park: "I mentioned Dialectical Materialism, whereupon the Communist leader challenged me. 'What is Dialectical Materialism?' he asked. I replied, 'Dialectical Materialism is the philosophy of Karl Marx that he formulated by taking the dialectic of Hegel, marrying it to the materialism of Feuerbach, abstracting from it the concept of progress in terms of the conflict of contradictory, interacting forces called the Thesis and the Antithesis, culminating at a critical nodal point where one overthrows the other, giving rise to the Synthesis, applying it to the history of social development, and deriving therefrom an essentially revolutionary concept of social change.' The questioner looked at me with wide-open eyes. I added: 'Don't blame me. It is your philosophy, not mine.' "
In 1950 Schwarz's anti-Communism attracted the attention of two fundamentalist ministers, Rev. Carl McIntire of Collingswood, N.J., and Dr. T. T. Shields of Toronto,* who were touring Australia together. They persuaded him to travel to the U.S. for a two-month lecture tour on Communism.
Stool & Lectern. In 1953 Schwarz returned to this country again, developed his idea of a mass-effort Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, and eventually sold his medical practice in Sydney. Why did he do it? Explains Lillian May Schwarz, who remains in Australia with their three children and serves as secretary of the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade organization in her native country: "We feel that if Fred worked every hour of every day in Australia, he could not archieve nearly as much as he is achieving in America. If he awakens the U.S. to the full danger of Communism, he is automatically getting that great country on the side of Australia."